core organizing members

MAY CHew

​May Chew is an Assistant Professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and Department of Art History at Concordia University. Chew collaborates on Houses on Pengarth, a research and curation project centred on developing a socially-engaged, experimental art lab in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights community. Her recent work includes a chapter in the anthology Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press, 2015); articles in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History; and Public 57: Archives/Counter-Archives, which she co-edited with Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault.

Alice MING WAI Jim

Art historian and curator, Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor, Contemporary Art, in the Department of Art History, and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories. She is also interim director of the Queer Media Database Canada-Quebec Project and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Culture and the Americas. Her current research is on born-digital ethnic avatars created by Indigenous artists and artists of colour.

Surabhi Ghosh

Exhibition view, 2017, Photo by Guy L'Heureux

Artist and educator, Surabhi Ghosh is Assistant Professor & Program Coordinator, Fibres & Material Practices in the Department of Studio Arts. She is interested in how textiles as a form of media transmit, contain, and shape stories of place and identity. For immigrants—people for whom “place” is no longer stable—how do textiles contribute to their newly complex identities? And how do the descendants of immigrants negotiate their hyphenated cultural identities in relation to these materials?

Angélique Willkie

Lisa Graves

Performer, singer, dramaturge and pedagogue, Angélique Willkie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance, and co-director of the Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC / Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture & Technology). Her current research focuses on the notion of an indiviual corporeal dramaturgy, inspired by the trajectories of performer Josephine Baker and French transgender circus artist Phia Ménard. 

Group Members

Faculty members-at-large

Monika Kin Gagnon Professor of Communication Studies and a Concordia University Research Fellow. She has published widely on cultural politics, memory, and visual/media arts since the 1980s. Her books include Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002, with Richard Fung), and Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014, with Janine Marchessault).

Designer and educator, Rilla Khaled is Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Artsand director of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, under the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology. Her research & creation centres on the design of persuasive and critical/speculative playful media, interactions between games and culture, and practices involved in emerging forms of game design.

Director, writer and animator, Cilia Sawadogo is Associate Professor of Animation in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. She has received numerous awards for films she directed at the NFB or independently including L'Arbre aux esprits (2005), La ruse du lievre (2001) Christopher changes his name (1999), Le Joueur de Cora (1996), L'arrèt d'Autobus (1994), Naissance (1993) and La femme mariée à trois hommes (1993).

Media artist and educator, Leila Sujir is Associate Professor of Intermedia (Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts) in the Department of Studio Arts and Principal Investigator and Director of Elastic Spaces, an international Concordia-based research project that explores stereoscopy, 3D video and encompassing virtual and augmented reality.

Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro is the Canada Research Chair in Oral History Performance and Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre.

​Rajni Shah is a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at the  Acts of Listening Lab (Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling & Dept of Theatre).

Graduate student members

 
Raissa Simone Killoran’s PhD research examines how biracial descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade engage in performance, theatre, and expressive arts as informed by inter-generational trauma. She investigates biraciality as an aspect of the ongoing inter-generational trauma, studying the psychic effects of offspring and generations conceived through the rape of African slaves by slave masters. Raissa is in her third year of the PhD HUMA, under the co-supervision of Dr. Warren Linds and Professor Willkie.
 
Mikhel Proulx’s PhD research considers the artistic products from marginalized communities on the early Web. This research attends to histories of queer collectives, women’s communities, and Indigenous cultural networks, and asks what lessons can be learned from a generation of artists concerned with communication networks and social action. Mikhel is in the fifth year of the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia, under the supervision of Dr. Jim.
 
Artist, educator, and indefinitely mortal, Sanaz Sohrabi’s PhD research creation project examines historical film archives of oil production in Iran, specifically the ways in which the social engineering project led by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company in Abadan, turned into an iconic portrayal of modernity in the Middle-East. Sanaz is in in her first year of the PhD HUMA, working with Professors Jean-Claude Bustros, Krista Lynes, and Alice Jim.
 
Estelle/Gatien Wathieu’s MA research examines curatorial strategies developed by self-identified artists of colour on corporate social media platforms. Focusing on the work of the Art Hoe Collective, her thesis addresses the history of their movement since 2015 in relation to emergent forms of social justice media activism that focus on community building and empowerment. Estelle is in her third year of the MA in Art History program at Concordia University, under the supervision of Dr. Jim.
 
Artist and curator Swapnaa Tamhane is producing work that explores the notion of drawing as a record of looking as a way to document the presence of the postcolonial body and where the gendered body can be situated in the history of drawing or mark-making, strategies of display, and experiences of looking. Swapnaa has been a Research Fellow with support from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, and an International Fellow with Kulturstiftung des Bundes. Swapnaa is in her first year of the MFA Fibres & Material Practices (Studio Arts) program, under the supervision of Professor Ghosh.
 
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Additional student interest and participation at both the undergraduate and graduate levels will be enhanced by the already existing inter-university, interdisciplinary Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group (EAHR) student-led research group, founded by Dr. Jim in 2011, to explore and promote ethnocultural art histories in the Canadian context and to increase the visibility and support of students and faculty from diverse cultural communities. EAHR has organized extra-curricular annual exhibitions, conferences, and a lecture series, as well as collaborations with Montreal galleries and two Artexte Research Residency projects in 2015 and 2017, in which they learnt how to digitally map their own archive of activities (5 Years of EAHR).
 
EAHR | Media distinguishes itself from the EAHR student group by (1) its focus on the implications of digital tools for the study and making of research creation by members of ethnocultural communities; and (2) the regular combined involvement of faculty and graduate students in its annual programming.